American Merchant Ships and Sailors by Willis J. Abbot

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It is difficult to determine the time when sailing vessels next appeared
upon the lakes, but it was certainly not for nearly seventy-five years.
Captain Jonathan Carver reported a French schooner on Lake Superior about
1766, and in 1772 Alexander Harvey built a forty-ton sloop on the same
lake, in which he sought the site of a famous copper mine. But it was long
before Lake Superior showed more than an infrequent sail, though on Lake
Erie small vessels soon became common. Even in 1820 the furs of Lake
Superior were sent down to Chicago in bateaux.

Two small sailing vessels, the "Beaver" and the "Gladwin," which proved
very valuable to the besieged garrison at Detroit in 1763, were the next
sailing vessels on the lakes, and are supposed to have been built by the
English the year previous. It is said, that through the refusal of her
captain to take ballast aboard, the "Gladwin" was capsized on Lake Erie
and lost, and the entire crew drowned. The "Royal Charlotte," the
"Boston," and the "Victory" appeared on the lakes a few years later, and
went into commission between Fort Erie (Buffalo) and Detroit, carrying the
first year 1,464 bales of fur to Fort Erie, and practically establishing
commercial navigation.

It is hard to look clearly into the future. If the recommendations of one
J. Collins, deputy surveyor-general of the British Government, had
governed the destiny of the Great Lakes, the traffic between Buffalo and
the Soo by water, would to-day be in boats of fifteen tons or less. Under
orders of the English Government, Collins in 1788 made a survey of all the
lakes and harbors from Kingston to Mackinac, and in his report, expressing
his views as to the size of vessels that should be built for service on
the lakes, he said he thought that for service on Lake Ontario vessels
should be seventy-five or eighty tons burden, and on Lake Erie, if
expected to run to Lake Huron, they should be not more than fifteen tons.
What a stretch of imagination is necessary to conceive of the great volume
of traffic of the present time, passing Detroit in little schooners not
much larger than catboats that skim around the lakes! Imagine such a
corporation as the Northern Steamship Company, with its big fleet of steel
steamers, attempting to handle its freight business in sailing vessels of
a size that the average wharf-rat of the present time would disdain to
pilot. What a rush of business there would be at the Marine Post-Office in
Detroit, if some day this company would decide to cut off three of its
large steamers and send out enough schooners of the size recommended by
the English officer, to take their place! The fleet would comprise at
least 318 vessels, and would require not fewer than 1500 seamen to
navigate. It is sometimes said that there is a continual panorama of
vessels passing up and down the rivers of the Great Lakes, but what if the
Englishman had guessed right? Happily he did not, and vessels of 1500 tons
can navigate the connecting waters of Lake Huron and Lake Erie much better
than those of fifteen tons could in his time. That the early ship-builders
did not pay much attention to J. Collins, is evident from the fact that,
when the Detroit was surrendered to the Americans in 1796, twelve merchant
vessels were owned there of from fifty to one hundred tons each.

[Illustration: "THE RED-MEN SET UPON THEM AND SLEW THEM ALL"]

At the close of the eighteenth century the American sailor had hardly
superseded the red men as a navigator, and lake vessels were not much more
plentiful than airships are nowadays. Indeed, the entire fleet in 1799, so
far as can be learned, was as follows: The schooners "Nancy," "Swan," and
"Naegel;" the sloops "Sagina," "Detroit," "Beaver," "Industry,"
"Speedwell," and "Arabaska." This was the fleet, complete, of Lakes Huron,
Erie, and Michigan.

"A wild-looking set were the first white sailors of the lakes," says
Hubbard in his "Memorials of Half a Century." "Their weirdness was often
enhanced by the dash of Indian blood, and they are better described as
rangers of the woods and waters. Picturesque, too, they were in their red
flannel or leather shirts and cloth caps of some gay color, finished to a
point which hung over on one side with a depending tassel. They had a
genuine love for their occupation, and muscles that never seemed to tire
at the paddle and oar. These were not the men who wanted steamboats and
fast sailing vessels. These men had a real love for canoeing, and from
dawn to sunset, with only a short interval, and sometimes no midday rest,
they would ply the oars, causing the canoe or barge to shoot through the
water like a thing of life, but often contending against head winds and
gaining little progress in a day's rowing."

[Illustration: ONE OF THE FIRST LAKE SAILORS]

One of the earliest American sailors on a lake ship bigger than a bateau,
was "Uncle Dacy" Johnson, of Cleveland, who sailed for fifty years,
beginning about 1850. "When I was a chunk of a boy," says the old Captain
in a letter to a New York paper, "I put a thirty-two pound bundle on my
back and started on foot to Buffalo. I made the journey to Albany, N.Y.,
from Bridgeport, Conn., in sixteen days, which was nothing remarkable, as
I had $3 in money, and a bundle of food. Many a poor fellow I knew started
on the same journey with nothing but an axe. When I arrived at Buffalo I
found a very small town--Cleveland, Sandusky, and Erie, were all larger.
There were only two lighthouses on the lakes, one at Buffalo, which was
the first one built, and the other one at Erie. Buffalo was then called
Fort Erie, and was a struggling little town. My first trip as a sailor was
made from Buffalo to Erie, which was then considered quite a voyage. From
Buffalo to Detroit was looked upon as a long voyage, and a vessel of
thirty-two tons was the largest ship on the lakes. In 1813 I was one of a
crew of four who left Buffalo on the sloop 'Commencement' with a cargo of
whisky for Erie. While beating along shore the English frigate 'Charlotte'
captured us and two boatloads of red-coats boarded our vessel and took us
prisoners. We were paroled on shipboard the same day, and before night
concocted a scheme to get the Englishmen drunk on our whisky. One of our
fellows got drunk first, and told of our intentions, the plot was
frustrated, and we narrowly escaped being hung."

[Illustration: "TWO BOAT-LOADS OF REDCOATS BOARDED US AND TOOK US
PRISONERS"]

Once begun, the conquest of the lakes as a highway for trade was rapid. We
who live in the days of railroads can hardly appreciate how tremendous was
the impetus given to the upbuilding of a region if it possessed
practicable waterways. The whole history of the settlement of the Middle
West is told in the story of its rivers and lakes. The tide of
immigration, avoiding the dense forests haunted by Indians, the rugged
mountains, and the broad prairies into which the wheel of the heavy-laden
wagon cut deep, followed the course of the Potomac and the Ohio, the
Hudson, Mohawk, and the Great Lakes. Streams that have long since ceased
to be thought navigable for a boy's canoe were made to carry the settlers'
few household goods heaped on a flatboat. The flood of families going West
created a demand that soon covered the lakes with schooners and brigs.
Landed on the lake shore near some little stream, the immigrants would
build flatboats, and painfully pole their way into the interior to some
spot that took their fancy. Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois thus
filled up, towns growing by the side of streams now used only to turn
mill-wheels, but which in their day determined where the prosperous
settlement should be.

The steamboat was not slow in making its appearance on the lakes. In 1818,
while it was still an experiment on the seaboard, one of these craft
appeared on Lake Erie. The "Walk-in-the-Water" was her name, suggestive of
Indian nomenclature and, withal, exceedingly descriptive. She made the
trip from Buffalo to Detroit, not infrequently taking thirteen days. She
was a side-wheeler, a model which still holds favor on the lower lakes,
though virtually abandoned on the ocean and on Lake Superior. An oil
painting of this little craft, still preserved, shows her without a
pilot-house, steered by a curious tiller at the stern, with a smokestack
like six lengths of stovepipe, and huge unboxed wheels. She is said to
have been a profitable craft, often carrying as many as fifty passengers
on the voyage, for which eighteen dollars was charged. For four years she
held a monopoly of the business. Probably the efforts of Fulton and
Livingstone to protect the monopoly which had been granted them by the
State of New York, and the determination of James Roosevelt to maintain
what he claimed to be his exclusive right to the vertical paddle-wheel,
delayed the extension of steam navigation on the lakes as it did on the
great rivers. After four years of solitary service on Lake Erie, the
"Walk-in-the-Water" was wrecked in an October storm. Crowded with
passengers, she rode out a heavy gale through a long night. At daybreak
the cables parted and she went ashore, but no lives were lost. Her loss
was considered an irreparable calamity by the settlers at the western end
of the lake. "This accident," wrote an eminent citizen of Detroit, "may
be considered one of the greatest misfortunes which has ever befallen
Michigan, for, in addition to its having deprived us of all certain and
speedy communication with the civilized world, I am fearful it will
greatly check the progress of immigration and improvement."

It is scarcely necessary to note now that the apprehensions of the worthy
citizen of Michigan were unfounded. Steam navigation on the lakes was no
more killed by the loss of the pioneer craft than was transatlantic steam
navigation ended by the disapproving verdict of the scientists. Nowhere in
the world is there such a spectacle of maritime activity, nowhere such a
continuous procession of busy cargo-ships as in the Detroit River, and
through the colossal locks of the "Soo" canals. In 1827 the first
steamboat reached the Sault Ste. Marie, bearing among her passengers
General Winfield Scott, on a visit of inspection to the military post
there, but she made no effort to enter the great lake. About five years
later, the first "smoke boat," as the Indians called the steamers, reached
Chicago, the pigmy forerunner of the fleet of huge leviathans that all the
summer long, nowadays, blacken Chicago's sky with their torrents of smoke,
and keep the hurrying citizens fuming at the open draw of a bridge. All
side-wheelers were these pioneers, wooden of course, and but sorry
specimens of marine architecture, but they opened the way for great
things. For some years longer the rushing torrent of the Ste. Marie's kept
Lake Superior tightly closed to steamboats, but about 1840 the richness of
the copper mines bordering upon that lake began to attract capital, and
the need of steam navigation became crying. In 1845 men determined to put
some sort of a craft upon the lake that would not be dependent upon the
whims of wind and sails for propulsion. Accordingly, the sloop "Ocean," a
little craft of fifteen tons, was fitted out with an engine and wheels at
Detroit and towed to the "Soo." There she was dragged out of the water and
made the passage between the two lakes on rollers. The "Independence," a
boat of about the same size, was treated in the same way later in the
year. Scarcely anything in the history of navigation, unless it be the
first successful application of steam to the propulsion of boats is of
equal importance with the first appearance of steamboats in Lake Superior.
It may be worth while to abandon for a moment the orderly historical
sequence of this narrative, to emphasize the wonderful contrast between
the commerce of Lake Superior in the days of the "Independence" and
now--periods separated by scarcely sixty years. To-day the commerce of
that lake is more than half of all the great lakes combined. It is
conducted in steel vessels, ranging from 1500 to 8500 tons, and every year
sees an increase in their size. In 1901 more than 27,000,000 tons of
freight were carried in Lake Superior vessels, a gain of nearly 3,000,000
over the year before. The locks in the "Soo" canal, of which more later,
have twice had to be enlarged, while the Canadian Government has built a
canal of its own on the other side of the river. The discovery and
development of the wonderful deposits of iron ore at the head of the lake
have proved the greatest factors in the upbuilding of its commerce, and
the necessity for getting this ore to the mills in Illinois, Ohio, and
Pennsylvania, has resulted in the creation of a class of colossal
cargo-carriers on the lake that for efficiency and results, though not for
beauty, outdo any vessel known to maritime circles.

[Illustration: A VANISHING TYPE ON THE LAKES]

At the present time, when the project of a canal to connect the Atlantic
and Pacific oceans at the Central American Isthmus has almost passed out
of the sphere of discussion and into that of action, there is
suggestiveness in the part that the canal at the "Soo" played in
stimulating lake commerce. Until it was dug, the lake fleets grew but
slowly, and the steamers were but few and far between. Freight rates were
high, and the schooners and sloops made but slow passages. From an old
bill, of about 1835, we learn that freight rates between Detroit and
Cleveland, or Lake Erie points and Buffalo, were about as follows: Flour,
thirty cents a barrel; all grain, ten cents a bushel; beef, pork, ashes,
and whisky, thirteen cents a hundred pounds; skins and furs, thirty-one
cents a hundred weight; staves, from Detroit to Buffalo, $6.25 a thousand.
In 1831 there were but 111 vessels of all sorts on the lakes. In five
years, the fleet had grown to 262, and in 1845, the year when the first
steamer entered Lake Superior, to 493. In 1855, the year the "Soo" canal
was opened, there were in commission 1196 vessels, steam and sail, on the
unsalted seas. Then began the era of prodigious development, due chiefly
to that canal which Henry Clay, great apostle as he was of internal
improvements, said would be beyond the remotest range of settlements in
the United States or in the moon.

At the head of Lake Superior are almost illimitable beds of iron ore which
looks like rich red earth, and is scooped up by the carload with steam
shovels. Tens of thousands of men are employed in digging this ore and
transporting it to the nearest lake port--Duluth and West Superior being
the largest shipping points. Railroads built and equipped for the single
purpose of carrying the ore are crowded with rumbling cars day and night,
and at the wharves during the eight or nine months of the year when
navigation is open lie great steel ships, five hundred feet long, with a
capacity of from six thousand to nine thousand tons of ore. Perhaps in no
branch of marine architecture has the type best fitted to the need been so
scientifically determined as in planning these ore boats. They are cargo
carriers only, and all considerations of grace or beauty are rigidly
eliminated from their design. The bows are high to meet and part the heavy
billows of the tempestuous lakes, for they are run as late into the stormy
fall and early winter season as the ice will permit. From the forward
quarter the bulwarks are cut away, the high bow sheltering the forecastle
with the crews, while back of it rises a deck-house of steel, containing
the officers' rooms, and bearing aloft the bridge and wheel-house. Three
hundred feet further aft rises another steel deck-house, above the engine,
and between extends the long, flat deck, broken only by hatches every few
feet, battened down almost level with the deck floor. During the summer,
all too short for the work the busy iron carriers have to do, these boats
are run at the top of their speed, and on schedules that make the economy
of each minute essential. So they are built in such fashion as to make
loading as easy and as rapid as possible. Sometimes there are as many as
fourteen or sixteen hatches in one of these great ships, into each of
which while loading the ore chutes will be pouring their red flood, and
out of each of which the automatic unloaders at Cleveland or Erie will
take ten-ton bites of the cargo, until six or seven thousand tons of iron
ore may be unloaded in eight hours. The hold is all one great store-room,
no deck above the vessel's floor except the main deck. No water-tight
compartments or bulkheads divide it as in ocean ships, and all the
machinery is placed far in the stern. The vessel is simply a great steel
packing-box, with rounded ends, made strong to resist the shock of waves
and the impact of thousands of tons of iron poured in from a bin as high
above the floor as the roof of a three-story building. With vessels such
as these, the cost of carrying ore has been reduced below the level of
freight charges in any part of the world.

Yet comfort and speed are by no means overlooked. The quarters of the
officers and men are superior to those provided on most of the ocean
liners, and vastly better than anything offered by the "ocean tramps."
Many of the ships have special guest-cabins fitted up for their owners,
rivalling the cabins _de luxe_ of the ocean greyhounds. The speed of the
newer ships will average from fourteen to sixteen knots, and one of them
in a season will make as many as twenty round trips between Duluth and
Cleveland. Often one will tow two great steel barges almost as large as
herself, great ore tanks without machinery of any kind and mounting two
slender masts chiefly for signaling purposes, but also for use in case of
being cut adrift. For a time, the use of these barges, with their great
stowage capacity in proportion to their total displacement, was thought to
offer the cheapest way of carrying ore. One mining company went very
heavily into building these craft, figuring that every steamer could tow
two or three of them, giving thus for each engine and crew a load of
perhaps twenty-four thousand tons. But, seemingly, this expectation has
been disappointed, for while the barges already constructed are in active
use, most of the companies have discontinued building them. Indeed, at the
moment of the preparation of this book, there were but two steel barges
building in all the shipyards of the great lakes.

Another form of lake vessel of which great things were expected, but which
disappointed its promotors, is the "whaleback," commonly called by the
sailors "pigs." These are cigar-shaped craft, built of steel, their decks,
from the bridge aft to the engine-house, rounded like the back of a whale,
and carried only a few feet above the water. In a sea, the greater part of
the deck is all awash, and a trip from the bridge to the engine-house
means not only repeated duckings, but a fair chance of being swept
overboard. The first of these boats, called the "101," was built in
sections, the plates being forged at Cleveland, and the bow and stern
built at Wilmington, Del. The completed structure was launched at Duluth.
In after years she was taken to the ocean, went round Cape Horn, and was
finally wrecked on the north Pacific coast. At the time of the Columbian
Exposition, a large passenger-carrying whaleback, the "Christopher
Columbus," was built, which still plies on Lake Michigan, though there is
nothing discernible in the way of practical advantage in this design for
passenger vessels. For cargo carrying there would seem to be much in the
claims of their inventor, Alexander McDougall, for their superior capacity
and stability, yet they have not been generally adopted. The largest
whaleback now on the lakes is named after Mr. McDougall, is four hundred
and thirty feet over all, fifty feet beam, and of eight thousand tons
capacity. She differs from the older models in having a straight stem
instead of the "pig's nose."

[Illustration: THE "WHALEBACK"]

The iron traffic which has grown to such monster proportions, and created
so noble a fleet of ships, began in 1856, when the steamer "Ontonagon"
shipped two hundred and ninety-six tons of ore at Duluth. To-day, one
ship of a fleet numbering hundreds will carry nine thousand tons, and
make twenty trips a season. Mr. Waldon Fawcett, who has published in the
"Century Magazine" a careful study of this industry, estimates the total
ore cargoes for a year at about 20,000,000 tons. The ships of the ore
fleet will range from three hundred and fifty to five hundred feet in
length, with a draft of about eighteen feet--at which figure it must stop
until harbors and channels are deepened. Their cost will average $350,000.
The cargoes are worth upward of $100,000,000 annually, and the cost of
transportation has been so reduced that in some instances a ton is carried
twenty miles for one cent. The seamen, both on quarterdeck and forecastle,
will bear comparison with their salt-water brethren for all qualities of
manhood. Indeed, the lot of the sailor on the lakes naturally tends more
to the development of his better qualities than does that of the
salt-water jack, for he is engaged by the month, or season, rather than by
the trip; he is never in danger of being turned adrift in a foreign port,
nor of being "shanghaied" in a home one. He has at least three months in
winter to fit himself for shore work if he desires to leave the water, and
during the season he is reasonably sure of seeing his family every
fortnight. A strong trades-union among the lake seamen keeps wages up and
regulates conditions of employment. At the best, however, seafaring on
either lake or ocean is but an ill-paid calling, and the earnings of the
men who command and man the great ore-carriers are sorely out of
proportion to the profits of the employing corporations. Mr. Fawcett
asserts that $11,250 net earnings for a single trip was not unusual in one
season, and that this sum might have been increased by $4500 had the
owners taken a return cargo of coal instead of rushing back light for more
ore. As the vessels of the ore fleet are owned in the main by the steel
trust, their earnings are a consideration second to their efficiency in
keeping the mills supplied with ore.

The great canal at Sault Ste. Marie which has caused this prodigious
development of the lake shipping has been under constant construction and
reconstruction for almost half a century. It had its origin in a gift of
750,000 acres of public lands from the United States Government to the
State of Michigan. The State, in its turn, passed the lands on to a
private company which built the canal. This work was wholly
unsatisfactory, and very wisely the Government took the control of this
artificial waterway out of private hands and assumed its management
itself. At once it expended about $8,000,000 upon the enlargement and
improvement of the canal. Scarcely was it opened before the ratio at which
the traffic increased showed that it would not long be sufficient.
Enlarged in 1881, it gave a capacity of from fourteen feet, nine inches to
fifteen feet in depth, and with locks only four hundred feet in length.
Even a ditch of this size proved of inestimable value in helping vessels
to avoid the eighteen feet drop between Lake Superior and Lake Huron. By
1886 the tonnage which passed through the canal each year exceeded
9,000,000, and then for the first time this great waterway with a season
limited to eight or nine months, exceeded in the volume of its traffic the
great Suez canal. But shippers at once began to complain of its
dimensions. Vessels were constantly increasing both in length and in
draught, and the development of the great iron fields gave assurance that
a new and prodigious industry would add largely to the size of the fleet,
which up to that time had mainly been employed in carrying grain.
Accordingly the Government rebuilt the locks until they now are one
hundred feet in width, twenty-one feet deep, and twelve hundred feet
long. Immediately vessels were built of a size which tests even this great
capacity, and while the traffic through De Lessep's famous canal at Suez
has for a decade remained almost stationary, being 9,308,152 tons, in
1900, the traffic through the "Soo" has increased in almost arithmetical
proportion every year, attaining in 1901, 24,696,736 tons, or more than
the combined tonnage of the Suez, Kiel, and Manchester canals, though the
"Soo" is closed four months in the year. In 1887 the value of the iron ore
shipments through the canal was $8,744,995. Ten years later it exceeded
$30,000,000. Meanwhile it must be remembered that the Canadian Government
has built on its own side of the river very commodious canals which
themselves carry no small share of the Lake Superior shipments. An
illustration of the fashion in which superior facilities at one end of a
great line of travel compel improvements all along the line is afforded by
the fact that since the canal at the "Soo" has been deepened so as to take
vessels of twenty-one feet draught with practically no limit upon their
length, the cry has gone up among shippers and vessel men for a
twenty-foot channel from Duluth to the sea. At present there are several
points in the lower lakes, notably at what is called the Lime Kiln
Crossing, below Detroit, where twenty-foot craft are put to some hazard,
while beyond Buffalo the shallow Welland Canal, with its short locks, and
the shallow canals of the St. Lawrence River have practically stopped all
effort to establish direct and profitable communication between the great
lakes and the ocean. Such efforts have been made and the expedients
adopted to get around natural obstacles have sometimes been almost
pathetic in the story they tell of the eagerness of the lake marine to
find an outlet to salt-water. Ships are cut in two at Cleveland or at
Erie and sent, thus disjointed, through the canals to be patched together
again at Quebec or Montreal. One body of Chicago capitalists built four
steel steamers of about 2500 tons capacity each, and of dimensions suited
to the locks in the Welland Canal, in the hopes of maintaining a regular
freight line between that city and Liverpool. The vessels were loaded with
full cargo as far as Buffalo, there discharged half their freight, and
went on thus half-laden through the Canadian canals. But the loss in time
and space, and the expense of reshipment of cargo made the experiment an
unprofitable one. Scarcely a year has passed that some such effort has not
been made, and constantly the wonderful development of the ship-building
business on the Great Lakes greatly increases the vigor of the demand for
an outlet. Steel ships can be built on the lakes at a materially smaller
cost than anywhere along the seaboard. In the report of the Commissioner
of Navigation for 1901 it is noted that more than double the tonnage of
steel construction on the Atlantic coast was reported from the lakes. If
lake builders could send their vessels easily and safely to the ocean, we
should not need subsidies and special legislation to reestablish the
American flag abroad. By the report already quoted, it is shown that
thirty-nine steel steamers were built in lake yards of a tonnage ranging
from 1089 tons to 5125. Wooden ship-building is practically dead on the
lakes. In June of that year twenty-six more steel steamers, with an
aggregate tonnage of 81,000 were on the stocks in the lake yards. Two of
these are being built for ocean service, but both will have to be cut in
two before they can get through the Canadian canals. It is not surprising
that there appears among the people living in the commonwealths which
border on the Great Lakes a certain doubt as to whether the expenditure by
the United States Government of $200,000,000 for a canal at the Isthmus
will afford so great a measure of encouragement to American shipping and
be of as immediate advantage to the American exporter, as a twenty-foot
channel from Duluth to tide-water.

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